iniduro ni emilie

notwithstanding his tisoy look, mlq employed, and pretty much sounds, filipino english, which i find non-alienating. any sound clip where he uttered his famous line on filipino governance? would love to hear the crispiness of such utterance.

hvrds

You do this country a great service by sharing with others in your blog snippets of history under your grandfather’s time. A lot of myths were created as is a part of the process of storytelling but reading from the actual actors of history is telling. The country known as the Philippine Islands still struggling to understand the prerequisites of statehood much more nationhood will eventually evolve or devolve.

hvrds

July 2, 2006
Celebrating July 2
10 Days That Changed History
By ADAM GOODHEART

IT’S a badly kept secret among scholars of American history that nothing much really happened on Thursday, July 4, 1776.

Although this date is emblazoned on the Declaration, the Colonies had actually voted for independence two days earlier; the document wasn’t signed until a month later. When John Adams predicted that the “great anniversary festival” would be celebrated forever, from one end of the continent to the other, he was talking about July 2.

Indeed, the dates that truly made a difference aren’t always the ones we know by heart; frequently, they’ve languished in dusty oblivion. The 10 days that follow Ã¢â‚¬â€ obscure as some are Ã¢â‚¬â€ changed American history. (In some cases, they are notable for what didn’t happen rather than what did.)

This list is quirky rather than comprehensive, and readers may want to continue the parlor game on their own. But while historians may argue endlessly about causes and effects Ã¢â‚¬â€ many even question the idea that any single day can alter the course of human events Ã¢â‚¬â€ these examples show that destiny can turn on a slender pivot, and that history often occurs when nobody is watching.

Anyway, happy Second of July.

JUNE 8, 1610: A Lord’s Landfall

Three years after its founding, the Virginia Colony was a failure. A few dozen starving settlers packed some meager possessions and sailed from Jamestown on June 7, headed back toward England. The next morning, to their surprise, they spotted a fleet coming toward them, carrying a new governor, Lord De La Warr, and a year’s worth of supplies.

If not for his appearance, Virginia might have gone the way of so many lost colonies. What is now the Southeastern United States could well have ended up in the French or Dutch empires. Tobacco might never have become a cash crop, and the first African slaves would not have arrived in 1619.

OCT. 17, 1777: Victory Along the Hudson

If one date should truly get credit for securing America’s independence, it is when the British general John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga.

The battle’s significance was more diplomatic than military: shortly after news reached Paris, the French king decided to enter the war on the American side. “If the French alliance and funding hadn’t come through at that moment, it’s hard to say how much longer we could have held out,” says Stacy Schiff, author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” The American Revolution might have gone down in history as a brief provincial uprising, and the Declaration of Independence as a nice idea.

JUNE 20, 1790: Jefferson’s Dinner Party

On this evening, Thomas Jefferson invited Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to dinner at his rented house on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan. In the course of the night, Jefferson recalled, they brokered one of the great political deals in American history. Under the terms of the arrangement, the national capital would be situated on the Potomac, and the federal government would agree to take on the enormous war debts of the 13 states.

Had that meal never taken place, New York might still be the nation’s capital. But even more important, the primacy of the central government might never have been established, says Ron Chernow, the Hamilton biographer. “The assumption of state debts was the most powerful bonding mechanism of the new Union,” he says. “Without it, we would have had a far more decentralized federal system.”

APRIL 19, 1802: Mosquitos Win the West

Events that change America don’t always occur within our borders. Consider the spring of 1802. Napoleon had sent a formidable army under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to quell the rebellion of former slaves in Haiti.

On April 19, Leclerc reported to Napoleon that the rainy season had arrived, and his troops were falling ill. By the end of the year, almost the whole French force, including Leclerc himself, were dead of mosquito-borne yellow fever.

When Napoleon realized his reconquest had failed, he abandoned hopes of a New World empire, and decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

“Across a huge section of the American heartland, from New Orleans up through Montana, they ought to build statues to Toussaint L’Ouverture and the other heroes of the Haitian Revolution,” says Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

JAN. 12, 1848: An Ill-Advised Speech

His timing couldn’t have been worse: With the Mexican War almost won, a freshman congressman rose to deliver a blistering attack on President Polk and his “half-insane” aggressive militarism. Almost from the moment he sat down again, the political career of Representative Abraham Lincoln seemed doomed by the antiwar stand he had taken just when most Americans were preparing their victory celebrations.

Yet that speech saved Lincoln. “It cast him into the political wilderness,” says Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author of “Lincoln’s Melancholy.” This insulated him during the politically treacherous years of the early 1850’s Ã¢â‚¬â€ when Americans divided bitterly over slavery Ã¢â‚¬â€ and positioned him to emerge as a national leader on the eve of the Civil War. Lincoln’s early faux pas also taught him to be a pragmatist, not just a moralist. “If he had been successful in the 1840’s, the Lincoln of history Ã¢â‚¬â€ the Lincoln who saved the Union Ã¢â‚¬â€ would never have existed,” Mr. Shenk says.

APRIL 16, 1902: The Movies

Motion pictures seemed destined to become a passing fad. Only a few years after Edison’s first crude newsreels were screened Ã¢â‚¬â€ mostly in penny arcades, alongside carnival games and other cheap attractions, the novelty had worn off, and Americans were flocking back to live vaudeville.

Then, in spring 1902, Thomas L. Tally opened his Electric Theater in Los Angeles, a radical new venture devoted to movies and other high-tech devices of the era, like audio recordings.

“Tally was the first person to offer a modern multimedia entertainment experience to the American public,” says the film historian Marc Wanamaker. Before long, his successful movie palace produced imitators nationally, which would become known as “nickelodeons.” America’s love affair with the moving image Ã¢â‚¬â€ from the silver screen to YouTube Ã¢â‚¬â€ would endure after all.

FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair

It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.

Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism Ã¢â‚¬â€ these would never have happened,” says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. “It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don’t think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt’s would have.”

MARCH 2, 1955: Almost a Heroine

When a brave young African-American woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, local and national civil rights leaders rallied to her cause. Claudette Colvin, 15, seemed poised to become an icon of the struggle against segregation. But then, shortly after her March 2 arrest, she became pregnant. The movement’s leaders decided that an unwed teenage mother would not make a suitable symbol, so they pursued a legal case with another volunteer: Rosa Parks.

That switch, says the historian Douglas Brinkley, created a delay that allowed Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge as a leader. He most likely would not have led the bus boycott if it had occurred in the spring instead of the following winter. “He might have ended up as just another Montgomery preacher,” Professor Brinkley says.

SEPT. 18, 1957: Revolt of the Nerds

Fed up with their boss, eight lab workers walked off the job on this day in Mountain View, Calif. Their employer, William Shockley, had decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors; frustrated, they decided to undertake the work on their own. The researchers Ã¢â‚¬â€ who would become known as “the traitorous eight” Ã¢â‚¬â€ went on to invent the microprocessor (and to found Intel, among other companies). “Sept. 18 was the birth date of Silicon Valley, of the electronics industry and of the entire digital age,” says Mr. Shockley’s biographer, Joel Shurkin.

AUG. 20, 1998: Just Missed

With most Americans absorbed by the Monica Lewinsky affair, relatively few paid much attention when the United States fired some 60 cruise missiles at Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Most public debate centered on whether President Clinton had ordered the strike to deflect attention from his domestic troubles.

Although the details of that day remain in dispute, some accounts suggest that the attack may have missed killing Osama bin Laden by as little as an hour. How that would have changed America Ã¢â‚¬â€ and the world Ã¢â‚¬â€ may be revealed, in time, by the history that is still unfolding.

Adam Goodheart is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

EACH year, dozens of new books feed an insatiable public appetite for stories about the men who made the American nation. While some writers and scholars denounce the elitism, racism and most of all the slaveholding of the nation’s founders, others defend them and deplore the debunking to which they are subject. But lost amid these quarrels is a more subtle and in many ways more interesting question Ã¢â‚¬â€ one worth pondering on this July 4.

How exactly did a group of lawyers and politicians become founding fathers in the first place, heroes to be venerated by generations of Americans? Answering that question draws our attention beyond the small, famous band of founding brothers to other, unsung founders Ã¢â‚¬â€ men who, if they did not create the American nation, did create American nationalism.

Consider Mason Locke Weems: author, clergyman, book peddler. Not a great man, perhaps, but a maker of great men; not counted among the popular sages, but certainly among those who made them popular. Born in 1759 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Weems studied medicine and then became a clergyman before abandoning his religious calling in favor of a nationalist one. Armed with little more than his wit and charm, Parson Weems traversed the country selling schoolbooks, almanacs, biographies and other popular literature in towns and villages from New York to Georgia.

Traveling along Virginia’s dusty, dilapidated roads in 1799, Weems was composing a brief pamphlet on George Washington Ã¢â‚¬â€ enumerating his virtues and encouraging Americans to emulate them Ã¢â‚¬â€ when he heard that the great man had just died.

“I have something to whisper in your lug,” he wrote Mathew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher and Weems’s partner in the Southern book trade. “Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly primed and cocked for ’em.”

Weems went on to write one of the most important works of American history: a popularizing, largely fictionalized account of Washington’s life that turned him into a down-home, evangelical hero for a rural and increasingly religious nation. Ever hear of Washington and the cherry tree Ã¢â‚¬â€ of Washington who could not tell a lie? Weems’s biography gave birth to this popular image.

In the process, Weems helped make Washington into the nation’s common father. “Our children,” he predicted, “and our children’s children, hearing the great name of Washington re-echoed from every lip with such veneration and delight, shall ask their fathers, ‘What was it that raised Washington to this godlike height of glory?’ ” His writings would provide the answer.

Indeed, in many respects, the national symbols Americans revere today Ã¢â‚¬â€ the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding fathers Ã¢â‚¬â€ entered our canon not through the work of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Washington, but through the work of far less celebrated figures like Weems.

Weems’s partner, Mathew Carey, was one such figure. An Irish Catholic who was born in 1760 and immigrated to Philadelphia after the Revolution, Carey published a monthly magazine called the American Museum, which printed patriotic works. His efforts to encourage nationalism through popular literature earned him praise from some of the most eminent figures of the era, including Washington.

“For my part,” Washington wrote Carey, “I entertain an high idea of the utility of periodical publications; insomuch that I could heartily desire copies of the Museum and magazines, as well as common gazettes, might be spread through every city, town and village in America.”

Carey dedicated his life to publishing texts that promoted American nationalism. He would eventually acquire the copyright for Weems’s biography of Washington, which taught hundreds of thousands of Americans to honor the nation’s “father.”

But Carey and Weems were not alone in such endeavors. Their contemporary, the printer, schoolteacher and bookseller Caleb Bingham, born in Connecticut in 1757, similarly churned out almanacs, conduct manuals and schoolbooks. A committed Jeffersonian, Bingham wrote some of the most popular schoolbooks of the era Ã¢â‚¬â€ works that would teach American children to exalt liberty, the nation, and the values of their founders.

Bingham’s books were widely distributed. In the early 1820’s, a young Baltimore slave learned how to read by studying Bingham’s “Columbian Orator,” a collection of political speeches and dialogues. After a daring escape from slavery, this man Ã¢â‚¬â€ Frederick Douglass Ã¢â‚¬â€ became one of the greatest American abolitionists (as well as a writer and publisher), working to transform the nation in the image of the principles articulated on July 4, 1776, and in Bingham’s schoolbooks.

Surely the most famous of the founders’ founders, however, was Noah Webster. Born in Connecticut in 1758, Webster briefly practiced law and then, failing as a lawyer, turned to teaching. Frustrated by the “English” character of contemporary schoolbooks, Webster took matters into his own hands. His nationalist mission would eventually transform the language we use today.

Webster published his first speller in 1783, followed by a grammar, a reader and eventually his life’s work, a dictionary. All were astonishingly popular. Emphasizing homegrown virtues and national heroes (“Washington was not a selfish man,” read one of the most popular editions of his speller; “he labored for the good of his country, more than for himself”), Webster’s texts would teach Americans not just to spell and indeed to think, but to do both as Americans.

Born within three years of one another, too young to lead the Revolution but of an age to teach Americans to venerate it, of varying political persuasions but united by their desire to create a nation: these men, along with dozens of other, more anonymous printers and booksellers, may well be America’s true founding fathers.

In the post-Revolutionary era, Americans were bombarded with material such men produced: biographies and pamphlets, almanacs and schoolbooks, broadsides, prints and images, works that circulated in the hundreds of thousands of copies, sometimes in the millions, published year after year, read aloud in schools and at homes and on patriotic occasions, carrying messages to audiences in the towns and distant hinterlands of the young nation.

Eventually, these texts would persuade a fractious, rebellious, polyglot people to unite in adulation of the nation’s founding fathers and to celebrate its most important documents as nothing less than sacred scripture.

As the years wore on, the almanacs, schoolbooks and pamphlets of the early republic would gather dust in attics, ignored by subsequent generations of Americans who took for granted the nationalism such texts had created. And thus it became easy to forget that once there was a time when the Declaration of Independence was not considered sacred, and when the founding fathers were viewed simply as men, rather than as gods to be worshipped or myths to be debunked.

So as Americans celebrate this day by looking back on the Declaration of Independence and the men who wrote it, we might also spare a thought for lesser known figures like Weems, Carey, Bingham and Webster, and for they texts they wrote. These men and their publications Ã¢â‚¬â€ at least as much as the founding fathers Ã¢â‚¬â€ created the common heritage Americans celebrate today.

FranÃƒÂ§ois Furstenberg, an assistant professor of history at the University of Montreal, is the author of “In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation.

i am not writing about the topic u wrote above. sorry. i just wanna say that isagani cruz’ bigotry is patent and his acerbity and sarcasm are still evident in his column today, sunday. i pity his senility. sigh.

Francis

Knowing you to be an advocate for truth and transparency…can I now ask you your stand on meralco vs consumer?

from MST
Ã¢â‚¬Å“It is ironic because the Lopezes have been portraying themselves, through their media empire of ABS-CBN, ANC and dzMM, champions of government accountability and press freedom. They want accountability for everyone else but their own. They want media attention on every devious scheme but their own deceit.Ã¢â‚¬Â

from philstar
Are they now, when it is their own business practices that have come under intense public scrutiny, turning around to become advocates of managed news? Are they going to provide the public a sanitized Ã¢â‚¬Å“official versionÃ¢â‚¬Â of what will happen on the floor today?
Restricted media coverage may be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.